Hhhmmmm... By the way, I'm not applauding Obama's actions, far from it. I could birth a bovine over continued atrocities against our Constitution. I voted for change... What-The-F!!!. However, how much do you think the share holder of GM would have gotten once they parted GM out. Five cents on the dollar? Ten cents? That would surprise me, in fact in the midst of the economy in full China Sydrome (or do you forget what was going on at that moment in history?) I'd be surprised if you'd gotten Three cents on the dollar. So twenty seven cents sounds like a pretty sweet deal. More important, once the share holders had sucked the corpse dry, every other debtor down the road would have been holding the bag and tens of thousands of employees would have been spaced. "THE PRESIDENT" has to look out for EVERYBODY, not just share holders. Sorry if your OX got gored, a bunch of us got our asses handed to us, but in the end, you might cut the poor bastard trying to keep the ship floating a little slack. Those guys over there on WallStreet, snorting blow and burning a couple grand a night on high priced hookers, betting against their own investors and setting the world to explode because it was good for their bottom line, those guys I would have a little enmity for. The President in this one and specific case was just one more poor bastard holding the bag, and I feel sympathy and compassion for all the poor bastards.
So its not the teachers or even their unions who are the problem... they simply use a corrupt and broken system the same way as any of the other organized bodies especially including corporations to manipulate the government. You want that to go away, remove the channel for buying legislation from your state constitution and pass laws that criminalize making and taking bribes (actual or implied.)
For the most part, teaching is a noble profession (and yes wherever you have enough people you have idiots, crooks and criminals, it true any significant population of human beings.) If public schools are a disaster, I would be far more likely to blame the administration rather than the teachers. I say that with special acknowledgement to the fact that a huge amount of the money we pay to public education lands in the hands of administration vs doing the actual job of teaching.
The problem isn't you. its a private sector that continues to squeeze the average worker until he and his family bleed. When they look over at you and see you not bleeding their response is what makes you so special. Worse when the economy is broken and state economies are on or over the verge of collapse, private sector worker begin to see it as y'all being greedy (and your unions) rather than pinning the responsibility for the problem where it belongs with powerful and wealthy men who have used the American Economy as their own piggy bank. All they have to do to succeed, is pit us against one another so we don't notice their hand in our pockets and purses. Honestly, you aren't the problem.
Exactly. I'm in my mid 50s and I've had the honor of working at a couple companies for 5 years, but most jobs I've had since moving up to the Silicon Valley lasted on average from a year and a half to two years. At one level I get your point. Business today won't keep anyone on long enough to get a pension. This is however leading to a real problem. I and a significant number of my friends went to great length to prepare for our retirement only to see the greedy banking industry obliterate our savings by hijacking the economy. On the other end, what threatens to be runaway inflation caused by printing dollars in an effort to fake the world into eating our debt, threatens to turn whatever little is left into rolls of something squeezably soft (ask Mr. Whipple.)
I'm a boomer on the back end of the boom, but I have no illusions that there are a lot of converging forces that threaten social security and I don't want to have to depend on Social Security or Medicare to survive. What I see is a growingly hostile environment for the graying and gray, and I could imagine a society that marginalizes its aging members, even perhaps helping them leave the world in large numbers to accommodate those who are younger. I also see another possible trend that is equally frightening. Breakthroughs in technology and medicine dramatically increase lifespan and more important vital lifespan. With fewer and fewer young people taking science and technology as professional directions, Those of us with these skills may be pressured (using a number of means) to remain part of the workforce into what might have otherwise been our dotage. This would actually be just fine with me, if the gray didn't somehow become part of a marginalized class. Keeping us around as a slave class to stoke the machine keeping the young'uns in Big Macs and Mood Enhancers, isn't my idea of a utopian society.
We live in such uncertain and disruptive times, that its difficult to see ahead and make sane plans for the future. Even for those of us who have "made it", there are real concerns about what the future will bring. Our economy and the government manipulating it are utterly unsustainable. Our society will change, either in a planned and intelligent fashion or a catastrophic failure. In any case, There's no guarantee that current wealth will survive an economic reboot. Its time for all of us to begin looking at the obvious trend in technology, society and the environment and begin working to build a workable present and optimal future. Part of this includes giving up on the "I'm gonna cut me a slice" mentality. Managing for personal freedom and civil rights is profoundly American, that should continue, but now its time for us to also be responsible citizens of the world and work towards a world we can all live in together with the maximum happiness and opportunity for personal success and fulfillment.
To see Apple's new iPad commercial.... A Chinese boy stripped to the waste rocking out to the latest iTunes on his iPad with a huge scar over his left hip. The captions reads "IT WAS WORTH IT!!!
The problem with gold and other tangible assets is that they won't protect you in an economic blowout. You can't eat gold. Thry guy with the food and water trumps all other players
That's because in 1960 corporations paid 40% of the taxes collected by the government and the wealthiest 10% paid tremendously more tax than they pay now. Corporations now only account for less than 5% of the total taxes collected so the entire tax burden now rests on the shoulders of the middle class. Also, by the way, when CEOs complain about the ridiculous taxes they pay call bullshit, most fortune 100 companies pay little or no taxes and energy companies got huge government subsidies even when they made record profits. Check out the Taxes and Government Revenues over at Wikipedia. Most enlightening, and rather infuriating as well. We've been sold a pile of cow flops.
Actually an ice age is one of the very possible outcomes of AGW. The process goes like this; Warming melts the ice shields. Fresh water breaks the Haline Cycles and the trade currents die or shift precipitously. Northern latitudes that depend on those currents to maintain temperate climates go into a sudden deep freeze (remember Scotland is at the same latitude as Alaska, and London is at the same latitude as Calgary.) Northern Europe begins the process of going into a hard freeze as does Canada. The earth's albido rises significantly from all that new snow and we have successfully jump started the next ice age.
Of course we could just as easily turn the planet into a sauna unfit for any higher life forms. See that's the problem which playing craps with the global climate. You don't know what the dice are going to roll. One hint though, most of the possible outcomes don't include happy people in them.
Which is precisely the mentality that got us in this mess in the first place... I'm gonna party like it 1999, let the kids in the new millennium pick up the tab... and now we have the printing presses cranking out Benjamins as fast as they can, the fan and shit are kissing, and your best thought is, "Is there any more room under the rug, hope I'm dead when this all goes to hell..."
Spoken like a true American AssHat. I doff my bonnet to you sir.
Apparently you haven't been keeping up with the science. We have ice cores which include trapped air samples from the past. We have plants as old as 4,000 years with growth rings giving us precise snapshots of climate. We have ocean cores giving the snapshot of plankton fall to the bottom of the ocean telling us about temperature, salinity, ocean ph, climate, and we have fossils with pristine samples of water and air trapped in them. We have a reasonable picture from many different locations of earth's climate going back many tens of millions of years. Your multiply century cycles are clearly present, so are even longer cycles caused by tilts in earths polar alignment and changes in the brightness of the sun. All of that is being taken into account. None of that explain the disastrous melting of the ice sheets we're currently seeing. We know what happens to carbon on this planet, and there is too much in the atmosphere. We human beings put it there and its causing problems. Now its time for us to use these big fat brains and figure our useful ways to pull the carbon back out. We actually have some brilliant people coming up with really interesting solutions. Turning atmospheric carbon into fuel using solar power is probably the one I like best, but there are many. Point is, rather than ignoring the problem because it impinges on your ideas of how things should work, just get the facts, and address them intelligently. Is that so hard?
You want to talk about fault, I'd go back to Ron Reagan putting Allen Watt in charge of the Department of The Interior, a Fundamentalist wacko whose very public position on the environment was that "WE MUST USE IT ALL UP BEFORE THE SECOND COMING..." That or changing the mandate of the National Forestry to "Harvest Lumber" at all cost or even Changing the Mandate of the EPA to running environmental interference for Corporate America. So we've been digging this hole since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but the last 30 years, we've been flying with the afterburners on... literally.
Oh, and you can see the huge jump in greenhouse gas emissions starting in 1980. Cause and effect... ain't science grand.
I would think it more likely that a supermassive blackhole was ejected by a galactic collision and landed in a dwarf galaxy where its living out its retirement. Hhhmmm, sounds vaguely like the Mel Gibson story...
If you got rid of corporations, you'd basically destroy the economy, and prevent a new one from growing.
That's bull. You could absolutely build a free market enterprise system on privately held companies and there is no reason that they couldn't function not only more successfully but also allowing their owners to treat their employees better and balance the profit motive with the need and desire to contribute to society. I can see no significant need for the blight that is corporations.
Also, everything you said above also works when you apply it to unions.
The Bakers Union destroyed the American icon of treats - Hostess. After they did so, the Bakers Union leaders basically came away saying it was a victory because they stood their ground and sent a message, meanwhile 18,000 people lost their jobs, while the union leadership kept theirs. Hostess didn't fail due to mismanagement either, look at the practices the unions forced upon them. Workers who handled snacks weren't allowed to handle bread. Workers who handled bread weren't allowed to handle snacks. Bread truckers were supposed to refuse snacks on their trucks, even if they were headed to the same store. Instead they had to have a separate truck for snacks. The unions forced this practice due to a mutual agreement between two separate unions so that they didn't have to compete for jobs.
Unions also hate technology. Technology often costs them their jobs, and they force their industries to stay behind as a result. When shipping first started moving to storage crates, the unions forced their employers to allow the dock workers to remove the contents of the crate while it was on land, then put the crate on the ship, then individually load its contents back into the crate. Why? Because the union couldn't stand the thought of the dock workers losing their job. Technologies change, and there will always be frictional unemployment.
I won't argue with you that modern unions are a mess and many unions cost workers jobs, but you picked the wrong example. The folks that just bought Hostess, hedge funds Silver Point Capital and Monarch Alternative Capital dumped a ton of toxic debt into the company on top of its own untenable debt burden from years of poor labor negotiations. The Vulture capitalists never has any intention of dealing with the labor issue (as expressed in the prior round of layoffs), and were far more interested killing off the company and part out its assets. Those 18,000 jobs were as good as toasted as soon as the vultures landed.
And then you have the bureaucracy the UAW creates. Employees who work at their station aren't allowed to correct problems with their equipment when it malfunctions, even if it is an easy fix. If they fix it themselves, then technicians who ARE supposed to fix it will file a grievance with their union, and the station worker will get reprimanded or even fired. How on earth can you compete on the global economy if you have to put up with that? It's no wonder GM and Chrysler went bankrupt.
I sure I could help you find a dozen other insanely stupid union practices that hurt profitability and endanger workers jobs. How does that for a moment compare with the point I was making above that some people are blaming corporations for our problems and some people are blaming the government and my view is that they are one and the same and that trying to separate them is a futile endeavor.
The bosses of these unions talk their members up about how they need to prevent their employers from having a six figure income so that the employees can have a greater share, but meanwhile they are forced to give up their money to pay the union boss a six figure income or else they'll be forced out of their union, and then fired because the union has a stranglehold on employer contracts.
Unions also buy out the government, to our detriment! The sugar industry lobbied for the sugar tariffs.
Friend its getting old... one group howls about those damn eggs and another those fucking chickens. Same guys just different position on the arc of douchebaggery. Corrupt Government feeds evil Corporations. Evil Corporations Corrupts Government. Whores and pimps, they're a matched set, they come like conjoined twins welded at the hip. You can have honest government. you just have to make it COMPLETELY TRANSPARENT. You can have honest Corporations, sorry, that's a flat out lie. Abolish corporations, they're a boil on the ass of society and they are nothing but disasters waiting to happen. Create other vehicles for people to combine resources into privately held business and hold them to account for the deeds they do. If they get caught trying to make government do something it shouldn't, fine them into the stone age and use the money to take care of sick babies and old folks.
We have every means at our disposal to create a body of zero sum games and clever social systems expressly designed to prevent the undue concentration of wealth and power while amply rewarding hard work, creative genius and in general managing something resembling a meritocracy. Its time to inspire the best in being human while limiting and managing the worst. Look at where the pointy sharp objects are in our system and whip a little social nerf on them so people can't fatally fuck up. As long as people are ignorant, greedy and self obsessed, bad things will happen. We can mitigate the disasters though, while still ensuring the maximum freedom and capacity to be human is preserved. That is a worthy goal for this generation./p>
I'm sorry, just because Hollywood has bought the Democratic party doesn't mean they're above showing the Republican party a good time to pass a bill. Both sides of the aisle are equally whore ridden and I can show you the votes to prove it, so don't even bother. Obama just made it easy for the bullies in Hollywood to have their way. To be absolutely honest, as much as I'm offended by what these parasites have done to music, movies and game, I'm flat out terrified at what the rest of Corporate America is doing to patents, copyright, and more fundamental human Intellectual Property.
I saw a routine by a comedian the other day about how "They" indoctrinate presidents now. Obama is brought into a huge, beautifully appointed board room, sits at a hardwood burl meeting table and suddenly the lights dim and huge screen drops from ceiling. Then a short piece of jumpy film plays, its JFK in Dallas, seen from the top of a grassy knoll, through telescopic sights. Them BLAM. The screen recedes and the lights come up. And a disembodied voice come over the ceiling speakers and in a Texas drawl... "We liked that boy... We don't like you. Son, you gonna git an orientation tomorrow morning at 0600 sharp and we expect you to do what we tell you to do. Got it?
Nah, the younger engineers are just infatuated with steam-punk... Wait till you see the generation of satellites with the brass fittings... woohoo!,/p>
Let's get real for a minute, eh. I've considered becoming a politician because somebody sane needs to go to Washington. Sadly I have strong convictions, a relatively strong moral compass and I'm not for sale, so I have no illusions that I'd make it there. Friend there's bad news in the world, and good news too, but you have to be able to deal with both without losing your mind. I just lost my partner of 35 years to ovarian cancer. When she's lost 40% of her body mass in under 2 months, it was pretty clear something bad was happening. Her doctor said you're going to die, soon. Your cancer was silent, now its advanced and loud as hell, and you're going to get to choose between longer and harder or shorter and easier.
So I have bad news for you about the world. Because they keep bringing this specific topic up, they like to see people like you and me pimp slap one another, its entertaining. In this area the news is bad, and if you can't accept that, then you can't address the problem and you're simply fucked. That's not an indictment. Or an accusation. Its a simple fact. You want to talk about good news, we can do that too. There is so much good news. Even in this area. There is brilliant technology with the sparkling promise of cleaning up these messes without draconian contortions of our economies or social liberties. But you have to face the issue so you can solve the problem with genius and inventiveness and audacity. Because hunkering down on a piece of ideological turf and defending that to the exclusion of all sanity is a waste of your humanity and an insult to mine. Wake up. Solve the real problem. Stop making this political. Its not and its never been.
So I guess you're personally and deeply offended by the significant state and local taxes spent on the early warning systems built in the Lahar flood plain in Washington precisely to save tens of thousands of lives and prevent human tragedy WHEN the mountain gives way. Maybe you'd think the money was better spent training folks on the finer points of surfing boiling mud. You can stand around spelunking your own rectum and be surprised when you and yours are wiped from the face of the earth. Or you can begin to assess real threats to human beings now, and make small investments in logical contingencies, mitigating technologies, clever problem solutions, and outright fixes through global consensus. I realize that's not as much fun as using your navel as a peephole or calling people names because they aren't adventurous enough to french kiss wall outlets with you, but maybe there's room in the world for sane people too, you think?
All I'm saying is that there are repercussions to being an idiot. When you find yourself at the bottom of a hole... STOP DIGGING. We made this problem. We can unmake it, but so many clowns out there refuse to even see a problem because it interferes with their world view. Tough. Your worldview is a personal fantasy, get over it. Reality trumps your opinion every time. Mine too. That the nature of reality vs Opinion.
Oh yeah, this makes complete sense, for example Americans have always been so excited to have Mexicans just come marching over the border. I'm sure if that number ever rose to 150,000,000 we'd welcome them with open arms. Those pesky artificial boundaries of which you speak of are called national borders and when refugees anywhere on the planet try to leave the disaster they come from, they create a brand new disaster where they are stopped, at of all places... NATIONAL BORDERS. You imagine that's going to go away? Whatever you're smoking, please let me know, I'd like some. As for the amount of sea level rise... the last two years have shown an acceleration of the melting of the Greenland ice mass and a number of other large bodies of ice profoundly faster than expected. I'm the first to say 2 years does not a trend make, give it what, 10 more years, if this in fact the new normal, we're all boogered. The Greenland ice mass could raise global sea levels 20 feet all by itself. Say goodbye to Bangladesh. Florida becomes the newest Caribbean Island and its half its current size. Most of Louisianan is gone, as well as significant amounts of coastal Texas, Mississippi and Georgia. The San Francisco bay expands engulfing the entire Silicon Valley and the wine country of the North Bay. Kiss Manhattan goodbye. Amsterdam gone. Venice Ciao. Even London would be seriously threatened. So your answer is to open borders and let people come and go as they please when the water rises. Logical. Utterly batfsck insane, but logical.
The problem with this conversation is that when the same change that has happened over 20,000 years happens in 80, particularly in a world with strong national borders and infrastructure to prevent both animal and human migration, what you have coming is a biblical disaster. You know... Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria! So you propose a 50 year human exodus from the tropics for most of 3-6 billion people as a solution to us as opposed to just cleaning up the mess we made. So let me wrap my head around this, correct me if I'm missing something, rather than ceasing to crap all over the scenery and cleaning up the mess we've been making for centuries, you suggest we should just keep crapping away and avoid the advancing crap wall as it chases us north. Yeah, that sounds like a plan, sign me up. Just for laughs, what happens when the last 100 million of us are treading water at the north pole trying to climb up each others back? Don't bother, I don't need an explanation.
I'm all for technological solutions, bright folks all over the place are coming out with genius plans to harness the carbon, sequester it, use to to advance out society. Sticking my head in the sand and waiting for the lion to chew my haunches off just wasn't among them, it lacks a wee bit of technological finesse, don't you think, eh?
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Hhhmmmm... By the way, I'm not applauding Obama's actions, far from it. I could birth a bovine over continued atrocities against our Constitution. I voted for change... What-The-F!!!. However, how much do you think the share holder of GM would have gotten once they parted GM out. Five cents on the dollar? Ten cents? That would surprise me, in fact in the midst of the economy in full China Sydrome (or do you forget what was going on at that moment in history?) I'd be surprised if you'd gotten Three cents on the dollar. So twenty seven cents sounds like a pretty sweet deal. More important, once the share holders had sucked the corpse dry, every other debtor down the road would have been holding the bag and tens of thousands of employees would have been spaced. "THE PRESIDENT" has to look out for EVERYBODY, not just share holders. Sorry if your OX got gored, a bunch of us got our asses handed to us, but in the end, you might cut the poor bastard trying to keep the ship floating a little slack. Those guys over there on WallStreet, snorting blow and burning a couple grand a night on high priced hookers, betting against their own investors and setting the world to explode because it was good for their bottom line, those guys I would have a little enmity for. The President in this one and specific case was just one more poor bastard holding the bag, and I feel sympathy and compassion for all the poor bastards.
So its not the teachers or even their unions who are the problem... they simply use a corrupt and broken system the same way as any of the other organized bodies especially including corporations to manipulate the government. You want that to go away, remove the channel for buying legislation from your state constitution and pass laws that criminalize making and taking bribes (actual or implied.)
For the most part, teaching is a noble profession (and yes wherever you have enough people you have idiots, crooks and criminals, it true any significant population of human beings.) If public schools are a disaster, I would be far more likely to blame the administration rather than the teachers. I say that with special acknowledgement to the fact that a huge amount of the money we pay to public education lands in the hands of administration vs doing the actual job of teaching.
The problem isn't you. its a private sector that continues to squeeze the average worker until he and his family bleed. When they look over at you and see you not bleeding their response is what makes you so special. Worse when the economy is broken and state economies are on or over the verge of collapse, private sector worker begin to see it as y'all being greedy (and your unions) rather than pinning the responsibility for the problem where it belongs with powerful and wealthy men who have used the American Economy as their own piggy bank. All they have to do to succeed, is pit us against one another so we don't notice their hand in our pockets and purses. Honestly, you aren't the problem.
Exactly. I'm in my mid 50s and I've had the honor of working at a couple companies for 5 years, but most jobs I've had since moving up to the Silicon Valley lasted on average from a year and a half to two years. At one level I get your point. Business today won't keep anyone on long enough to get a pension. This is however leading to a real problem. I and a significant number of my friends went to great length to prepare for our retirement only to see the greedy banking industry obliterate our savings by hijacking the economy. On the other end, what threatens to be runaway inflation caused by printing dollars in an effort to fake the world into eating our debt, threatens to turn whatever little is left into rolls of something squeezably soft (ask Mr. Whipple.)
I'm a boomer on the back end of the boom, but I have no illusions that there are a lot of converging forces that threaten social security and I don't want to have to depend on Social Security or Medicare to survive. What I see is a growingly hostile environment for the graying and gray, and I could imagine a society that marginalizes its aging members, even perhaps helping them leave the world in large numbers to accommodate those who are younger. I also see another possible trend that is equally frightening. Breakthroughs in technology and medicine dramatically increase lifespan and more important vital lifespan. With fewer and fewer young people taking science and technology as professional directions, Those of us with these skills may be pressured (using a number of means) to remain part of the workforce into what might have otherwise been our dotage. This would actually be just fine with me, if the gray didn't somehow become part of a marginalized class. Keeping us around as a slave class to stoke the machine keeping the young'uns in Big Macs and Mood Enhancers, isn't my idea of a utopian society.
We live in such uncertain and disruptive times, that its difficult to see ahead and make sane plans for the future. Even for those of us who have "made it", there are real concerns about what the future will bring. Our economy and the government manipulating it are utterly unsustainable. Our society will change, either in a planned and intelligent fashion or a catastrophic failure. In any case, There's no guarantee that current wealth will survive an economic reboot. Its time for all of us to begin looking at the obvious trend in technology, society and the environment and begin working to build a workable present and optimal future. Part of this includes giving up on the "I'm gonna cut me a slice" mentality. Managing for personal freedom and civil rights is profoundly American, that should continue, but now its time for us to also be responsible citizens of the world and work towards a world we can all live in together with the maximum happiness and opportunity for personal success and fulfillment.
To see Apple's new iPad commercial.... A Chinese boy stripped to the waste rocking out to the latest iTunes on his iPad with a huge scar over his left hip. The captions reads "IT WAS WORTH IT!!!
The problem with gold and other tangible assets is that they won't protect you in an economic blowout. You can't eat gold. Thry guy with the food and water trumps all other players
That's because in 1960 corporations paid 40% of the taxes collected by the government and the wealthiest 10% paid tremendously more tax than they pay now. Corporations now only account for less than 5% of the total taxes collected so the entire tax burden now rests on the shoulders of the middle class. Also, by the way, when CEOs complain about the ridiculous taxes they pay call bullshit, most fortune 100 companies pay little or no taxes and energy companies got huge government subsidies even when they made record profits. Check out the Taxes and Government Revenues over at Wikipedia. Most enlightening, and rather infuriating as well. We've been sold a pile of cow flops.
Supply side should be renamed screw John Q.
You don't have webbed feet... you're buggered!!!
Actually an ice age is one of the very possible outcomes of AGW. The process goes like this; Warming melts the ice shields. Fresh water breaks the Haline Cycles and the trade currents die or shift precipitously. Northern latitudes that depend on those currents to maintain temperate climates go into a sudden deep freeze (remember Scotland is at the same latitude as Alaska, and London is at the same latitude as Calgary.) Northern Europe begins the process of going into a hard freeze as does Canada. The earth's albido rises significantly from all that new snow and we have successfully jump started the next ice age.
Of course we could just as easily turn the planet into a sauna unfit for any higher life forms. See that's the problem which playing craps with the global climate. You don't know what the dice are going to roll. One hint though, most of the possible outcomes don't include happy people in them.
You forgot;
4. Okay, it's happening, and we did it, and we could fix it, but Whhhaaaaaa waaaaaaaa.
Which is precisely the mentality that got us in this mess in the first place... I'm gonna party like it 1999, let the kids in the new millennium pick up the tab... and now we have the printing presses cranking out Benjamins as fast as they can, the fan and shit are kissing, and your best thought is, "Is there any more room under the rug, hope I'm dead when this all goes to hell..."
Spoken like a true American AssHat. I doff my bonnet to you sir.
Apparently you haven't been keeping up with the science. We have ice cores which include trapped air samples from the past. We have plants as old as 4,000 years with growth rings giving us precise snapshots of climate. We have ocean cores giving the snapshot of plankton fall to the bottom of the ocean telling us about temperature, salinity, ocean ph, climate, and we have fossils with pristine samples of water and air trapped in them. We have a reasonable picture from many different locations of earth's climate going back many tens of millions of years. Your multiply century cycles are clearly present, so are even longer cycles caused by tilts in earths polar alignment and changes in the brightness of the sun. All of that is being taken into account. None of that explain the disastrous melting of the ice sheets we're currently seeing. We know what happens to carbon on this planet, and there is too much in the atmosphere. We human beings put it there and its causing problems. Now its time for us to use these big fat brains and figure our useful ways to pull the carbon back out. We actually have some brilliant people coming up with really interesting solutions. Turning atmospheric carbon into fuel using solar power is probably the one I like best, but there are many. Point is, rather than ignoring the problem because it impinges on your ideas of how things should work, just get the facts, and address them intelligently. Is that so hard?
You want to talk about fault, I'd go back to Ron Reagan putting Allen Watt in charge of the Department of The Interior, a Fundamentalist wacko whose very public position on the environment was that "WE MUST USE IT ALL UP BEFORE THE SECOND COMING..." That or changing the mandate of the National Forestry to "Harvest Lumber" at all cost or even Changing the Mandate of the EPA to running environmental interference for Corporate America. So we've been digging this hole since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but the last 30 years, we've been flying with the afterburners on... literally.
Oh, and you can see the huge jump in greenhouse gas emissions starting in 1980. Cause and effect... ain't science grand.
I would think it more likely that a supermassive blackhole was ejected by a galactic collision and landed in a dwarf galaxy where its living out its retirement. Hhhmmm, sounds vaguely like the Mel Gibson story...
So now you can answer that question your Momma always asked... "Go wash you hands,,, do you know where that thing's been!!!?
Yet...
If you got rid of corporations, you'd basically destroy the economy, and prevent a new one from growing.
That's bull. You could absolutely build a free market enterprise system on privately held companies and there is no reason that they couldn't function not only more successfully but also allowing their owners to treat their employees better and balance the profit motive with the need and desire to contribute to society. I can see no significant need for the blight that is corporations.
Also, everything you said above also works when you apply it to unions.
The Bakers Union destroyed the American icon of treats - Hostess. After they did so, the Bakers Union leaders basically came away saying it was a victory because they stood their ground and sent a message, meanwhile 18,000 people lost their jobs, while the union leadership kept theirs. Hostess didn't fail due to mismanagement either, look at the practices the unions forced upon them. Workers who handled snacks weren't allowed to handle bread. Workers who handled bread weren't allowed to handle snacks. Bread truckers were supposed to refuse snacks on their trucks, even if they were headed to the same store. Instead they had to have a separate truck for snacks. The unions forced this practice due to a mutual agreement between two separate unions so that they didn't have to compete for jobs.
Unions also hate technology. Technology often costs them their jobs, and they force their industries to stay behind as a result. When shipping first started moving to storage crates, the unions forced their employers to allow the dock workers to remove the contents of the crate while it was on land, then put the crate on the ship, then individually load its contents back into the crate. Why? Because the union couldn't stand the thought of the dock workers losing their job. Technologies change, and there will always be frictional unemployment.
I won't argue with you that modern unions are a mess and many unions cost workers jobs, but you picked the wrong example. The folks that just bought Hostess, hedge funds Silver Point Capital and Monarch Alternative Capital dumped a ton of toxic debt into the company on top of its own untenable debt burden from years of poor labor negotiations. The Vulture capitalists never has any intention of dealing with the labor issue (as expressed in the prior round of layoffs), and were far more interested killing off the company and part out its assets. Those 18,000 jobs were as good as toasted as soon as the vultures landed.
And then you have the bureaucracy the UAW creates. Employees who work at their station aren't allowed to correct problems with their equipment when it malfunctions, even if it is an easy fix. If they fix it themselves, then technicians who ARE supposed to fix it will file a grievance with their union, and the station worker will get reprimanded or even fired. How on earth can you compete on the global economy if you have to put up with that? It's no wonder GM and Chrysler went bankrupt.
I sure I could help you find a dozen other insanely stupid union practices that hurt profitability and endanger workers jobs. How does that for a moment compare with the point I was making above that some people are blaming corporations for our problems and some people are blaming the government and my view is that they are one and the same and that trying to separate them is a futile endeavor.
The bosses of these unions talk their members up about how they need to prevent their employers from having a six figure income so that the employees can have a greater share, but meanwhile they are forced to give up their money to pay the union boss a six figure income or else they'll be forced out of their union, and then fired because the union has a stranglehold on employer contracts.
Unions also buy out the government, to our detriment! The sugar industry lobbied for the sugar tariffs.
Friend its getting old... one group howls about those damn eggs and another those fucking chickens. Same guys just different position on the arc of douchebaggery. Corrupt Government feeds evil Corporations. Evil Corporations Corrupts Government. Whores and pimps, they're a matched set, they come like conjoined twins welded at the hip. You can have honest government. you just have to make it COMPLETELY TRANSPARENT. You can have honest Corporations, sorry, that's a flat out lie. Abolish corporations, they're a boil on the ass of society and they are nothing but disasters waiting to happen. Create other vehicles for people to combine resources into privately held business and hold them to account for the deeds they do. If they get caught trying to make government do something it shouldn't, fine them into the stone age and use the money to take care of sick babies and old folks.
We have every means at our disposal to create a body of zero sum games and clever social systems expressly designed to prevent the undue concentration of wealth and power while amply rewarding hard work, creative genius and in general managing something resembling a meritocracy. Its time to inspire the best in being human while limiting and managing the worst. Look at where the pointy sharp objects are in our system and whip a little social nerf on them so people can't fatally fuck up. As long as people are ignorant, greedy and self obsessed, bad things will happen. We can mitigate the disasters though, while still ensuring the maximum freedom and capacity to be human is preserved. That is a worthy goal for this generation./p>
I'm sorry, just because Hollywood has bought the Democratic party doesn't mean they're above showing the Republican party a good time to pass a bill. Both sides of the aisle are equally whore ridden and I can show you the votes to prove it, so don't even bother. Obama just made it easy for the bullies in Hollywood to have their way. To be absolutely honest, as much as I'm offended by what these parasites have done to music, movies and game, I'm flat out terrified at what the rest of Corporate America is doing to patents, copyright, and more fundamental human Intellectual Property.
I saw a routine by a comedian the other day about how "They" indoctrinate presidents now. Obama is brought into a huge, beautifully appointed board room, sits at a hardwood burl meeting table and suddenly the lights dim and huge screen drops from ceiling. Then a short piece of jumpy film plays, its JFK in Dallas, seen from the top of a grassy knoll, through telescopic sights. Them BLAM. The screen recedes and the lights come up. And a disembodied voice come over the ceiling speakers and in a Texas drawl... "We liked that boy... We don't like you. Son, you gonna git an orientation tomorrow morning at 0600 sharp and we expect you to do what we tell you to do. Got it?
Nah, the younger engineers are just infatuated with steam-punk... Wait till you see the generation of satellites with the brass fittings... woohoo!,/p>
A thermonuclear hot pocket???
Perhaps a hot neutron enema???
The illegitimate child of a mixed couple from Poland and Ireland?
Let's get real for a minute, eh. I've considered becoming a politician because somebody sane needs to go to Washington. Sadly I have strong convictions, a relatively strong moral compass and I'm not for sale, so I have no illusions that I'd make it there. Friend there's bad news in the world, and good news too, but you have to be able to deal with both without losing your mind. I just lost my partner of 35 years to ovarian cancer. When she's lost 40% of her body mass in under 2 months, it was pretty clear something bad was happening. Her doctor said you're going to die, soon. Your cancer was silent, now its advanced and loud as hell, and you're going to get to choose between longer and harder or shorter and easier.
So I have bad news for you about the world. Because they keep bringing this specific topic up, they like to see people like you and me pimp slap one another, its entertaining. In this area the news is bad, and if you can't accept that, then you can't address the problem and you're simply fucked. That's not an indictment. Or an accusation. Its a simple fact. You want to talk about good news, we can do that too. There is so much good news. Even in this area. There is brilliant technology with the sparkling promise of cleaning up these messes without draconian contortions of our economies or social liberties. But you have to face the issue so you can solve the problem with genius and inventiveness and audacity. Because hunkering down on a piece of ideological turf and defending that to the exclusion of all sanity is a waste of your humanity and an insult to mine. Wake up. Solve the real problem. Stop making this political. Its not and its never been.
So I guess you're personally and deeply offended by the significant state and local taxes spent on the early warning systems built in the Lahar flood plain in Washington precisely to save tens of thousands of lives and prevent human tragedy WHEN the mountain gives way. Maybe you'd think the money was better spent training folks on the finer points of surfing boiling mud. You can stand around spelunking your own rectum and be surprised when you and yours are wiped from the face of the earth. Or you can begin to assess real threats to human beings now, and make small investments in logical contingencies, mitigating technologies, clever problem solutions, and outright fixes through global consensus. I realize that's not as much fun as using your navel as a peephole or calling people names because they aren't adventurous enough to french kiss wall outlets with you, but maybe there's room in the world for sane people too, you think?
All I'm saying is that there are repercussions to being an idiot. When you find yourself at the bottom of a hole... STOP DIGGING. We made this problem. We can unmake it, but so many clowns out there refuse to even see a problem because it interferes with their world view. Tough. Your worldview is a personal fantasy, get over it. Reality trumps your opinion every time. Mine too. That the nature of reality vs Opinion.
Oh yeah, this makes complete sense, for example Americans have always been so excited to have Mexicans just come marching over the border. I'm sure if that number ever rose to 150,000,000 we'd welcome them with open arms. Those pesky artificial boundaries of which you speak of are called national borders and when refugees anywhere on the planet try to leave the disaster they come from, they create a brand new disaster where they are stopped, at of all places... NATIONAL BORDERS. You imagine that's going to go away? Whatever you're smoking, please let me know, I'd like some. As for the amount of sea level rise... the last two years have shown an acceleration of the melting of the Greenland ice mass and a number of other large bodies of ice profoundly faster than expected. I'm the first to say 2 years does not a trend make, give it what, 10 more years, if this in fact the new normal, we're all boogered. The Greenland ice mass could raise global sea levels 20 feet all by itself. Say goodbye to Bangladesh. Florida becomes the newest Caribbean Island and its half its current size. Most of Louisianan is gone, as well as significant amounts of coastal Texas, Mississippi and Georgia. The San Francisco bay expands engulfing the entire Silicon Valley and the wine country of the North Bay. Kiss Manhattan goodbye. Amsterdam gone. Venice Ciao. Even London would be seriously threatened. So your answer is to open borders and let people come and go as they please when the water rises. Logical. Utterly batfsck insane, but logical.
The problem with this conversation is that when the same change that has happened over 20,000 years happens in 80, particularly in a world with strong national borders and infrastructure to prevent both animal and human migration, what you have coming is a biblical disaster. You know... Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria! So you propose a 50 year human exodus from the tropics for most of 3-6 billion people as a solution to us as opposed to just cleaning up the mess we made. So let me wrap my head around this, correct me if I'm missing something, rather than ceasing to crap all over the scenery and cleaning up the mess we've been making for centuries, you suggest we should just keep crapping away and avoid the advancing crap wall as it chases us north. Yeah, that sounds like a plan, sign me up. Just for laughs, what happens when the last 100 million of us are treading water at the north pole trying to climb up each others back? Don't bother, I don't need an explanation.
I'm all for technological solutions, bright folks all over the place are coming out with genius plans to harness the carbon, sequester it, use to to advance out society. Sticking my head in the sand and waiting for the lion to chew my haunches off just wasn't among them, it lacks a wee bit of technological finesse, don't you think, eh?